1179154

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PPSXXX10.1177/17456916231179154GoldenbergPerspectives on Psychological Science

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PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE

Perspectives on Psychological Science

What Makes Groups Emotional? 1­–14

© The Author(s) 2023
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DOI: 10.1177/17456916231179154
https://doi.org/10.1177/17456916231179154
www.psychologicalscience.org/PPS

Amit Goldenberg
Harvard Business School, Harvard Department of Psychology, Digital Data and Design Institute

Abstract
When people experience emotions in a group, their emotions tend to have stronger intensity and to last longer. Why is
that? This question has occupied thinkers throughout history, and with the use of digital media it is even more pressing
today. Historically, attention has mainly focused on processes driven by the way emotions are shared between people
via emotional interactions. Although interactions are a major driver of group emotionality, I review empirical findings
that suggest that understanding group emotionality requires a broader view that integrates two additional processes:
how emotions unfold within the social infrastructure in which they are shared and how these processes are affected by
people’s cognition about emotions. I propose to summarize the literature using an infrastructure-cognition-interaction
framework that contributes to a broader understanding of group emotionality, which should improve our ability to
predict group emotionality and to change these emotions when they are undesired.

Keywords
collective psychology, social networks

One of the oldest insights about human behavior is that
when people get together, they become more emotional
than they would have been as separated individuals
(Canetti, 1962; Durkheim, 1912; Le Bon, 1896). The main
premise behind this insight is that emotions naturally tend
to quickly calm down over time. However, when people
get together in groups, the overall intensity of people’s
emotions is higher, and the gravitational force of emotion
relaxation is reduced, leading groups to express strong
emotions for extended periods of time. After being dor-
mant for a few decades, the introduction of digital com-
munications and especially social media has reinvigorated
interest in groups’ emotionality (Alvarez et al., 2015;
Brady et al., 2017; Goldenberg, Garcia, et al., 2020;
Goldenberg & Gross, 2020; Páez et al., 2015; Shteynberg
et al., 2014). This new interest has also led to increasing
attempts to explain and predict group emotionality
(Bosse et al., 2014; Fan et al., 2018; Schweitzer & Garcia,
2010). Given this increased interest, it is the perfect
moment to be thinking about the social and psychologi-
cal processes that contribute to group emotionality, which
is the goal of the current article.
Before diving into the processes that contribute to
group emotionality, however, it is important to consider
why this question is even important. I wish to propose
two answers. The first is prediction; imagine that we
could look at the unfolding of a collective emotional
event and have a better sense of its future in terms of
potential spread, size, and length (see, e.g., Cheng
et al., 2014). In the same way that social scientists are
trying to predict individual emotionality in the form of
a psychotic breakdown or the onset of a depressive
episode (Benoit et al., 2020; Van De Leemput et al.,
2014), we should be striving to predict collective-level
emotionality. If we could predict the strength and dura-
tion of such emotions, we may be able to act differently
to change these emotions when they are destructive or
unhelpful. This leads me to the second answer to the
question of why understanding what makes groups emo-
tional is important: emotion regulation. Assuming that
we want to change group emotions, either to increase
or to decrease them, a central question is therefore what
processes we should focus on. Although we know quite
a lot about how to regulate individual emotions (Gross,
2015), even in group contexts (Goldenberg et al., 2016),
there has been very little research thus far on how
to regulate groups as a whole (Goldenberg, 2023).
Corresponding Author:
Amit Goldenberg, Harvard Business School, Harvard Department
of Psychology, Digital Data and Design Institute
Email: agoldenberg@hbs.edu
2 Goldenberg
Reviewing between-individual processes that contribute
to group emotionality is a first step in thinking about
how emotions of collectives can be changed.
In light of these considerations, the main argument I
wish to make in this article is that despite the tremen-
dous increase in interest in what makes groups emo-
tional, the vast majority of attention has been given to
emotional interactions between individuals: how emo-
tions are shared and communicated between individuals.
This can be seen by the vast literature on emotion con-
tagion and emotional sharing (for recent reviews, see
Goldenberg & Gross, 2020; Parkinson, 2020). Although
emotional interactions are clearly a central driver of
groups’ emotionality, I argue that to explain and predict
group emotionality, we need to consider two additional
types of processes and their interactions. The first is
emotion cognition, which is how people perceive, evalu-
ate, represent, and simulate others’ emotions. I argue
that the way emotions of multiple people are evaluated
can impact the unfolding of emotions in group contexts.
The second is the infrastructure in which emotional
interactions occur, which is the social network or the
physical space in which emotions are expressed. I argue
that the network infrastructure in which emotions are
shared has an important impact on group emotionality.
Therefore, the goal of the article is to extend the under-
standing of the processes that contribute to the intensity
and duration of groups’ emotionality by introducing an
interaction-cognition-infrastructure framework. This
simple framework is inspired by insights from other
models of collective behavior that suggest that collective
behavior is a function of a unique infrastructure and the
social interactions that occur within such an infrastruc-
ture (Galesic et al., 2021; Vlasceanu et al., 2018).
To fully explore these ideas, in the following sections
I open with some definitions of different levels of emo-
tions. After this initial stage, I organize the current lit-
erature using the interaction-perception-infrastructure
framework. Finally, I derive two important questions
that follow from this work, which are whether we can
predict group emotionality and whether and how we
can change it.
Defining Emotions
To be able to answer the question of what makes
groups emotional, we have to conceptualize emotions
at both the micro, individual level and the macro, col-
lective level. Generally speaking, individual emotions
(from now on simply called emotions) are defined as
flexible response systems (Frijda, 1986) that involve a
loosely coordinated set of responses including a physi-
ological response, a brain activation after a cognitive
process, and a behavioral attribute (Mauss et al., 2005)
that arise as a result of situations that represent a chal-
lenge or an opportunity (Tooby & Cosmides, 1990).
Emotions serve different functions, and one especially
important function for the current context is to help
people communicate their thoughts to others in a quick,
relatively clear and efficient way (Barrett, 2012; Buck
et al., 1992; Clark et al., 1996; Darwin, 1872; Ekman &
Friesen, 1969; Hess & Fischer, 2014; Levenson, 1994;
Manstead & Fischer, 2001; Parkinson, 2005; Van Kleef,
2009). This outward-leaning aspect of emotion is
reflected in the meaning of the word “emotion,” which
is derived from the Latin term emovere, to “move out”
(see Van Kleef, 2010). The communicative role of emo-
tions is especially important to groups’ behavior
because it helps groups to maintain social structures,
norms, and values by expressing emotions about what
is good and bad, allowed and prohibited (Eid & Diener,
2001; Smith & Mackie, 2016b; van Kleef & Fischer,
2016). The expression of emotions also helps group
members communicate about challenges and opportu-
nities at the collective level, helping group members,
for example, to identify risks and motivate efforts to
overcome them (Bar-Tal et al., 2007; Halperin, 2016;
Olsson & Ochsner, 2008).
Individual emotions are experienced in response to
situations that are relevant not only to individuals as
separate entities but also to groups, which can be
broadly defined as multiple individuals who share a
common identity, belief, or goal (Turner, 1982). When
emotions are experienced in group contexts, individuals
may experience emotions in response to situations that
are relevant to their group merely as a result of their
perceived group membership (e.g., Americans who are
feeling happiness for an American athlete who has just
won a gold medal). This subtype of individual emotions
is often called group-based emotions (Goldenberg et al.,
2016; Mackie et al., 2000; Smith, 1993; Smith & Mackie,
2016a). The strength of group-based emotions seems to
be dependent on one’s categorization as a member of
a certain group and on one’s degree of identification
with the specific group (Doosje et al., 1998; Halperin,
2014; Hopkins et al., 2016; Yzerbyt et al., 2003).
Group-based emotions are emotions that are expe-
rienced at the micro, individual level. When people
express emotions together, their emotions often tend
to influence each other in nonlinear ways (Garcia &
Rimé, 2019; Goldenberg, Garcia, et al., 2020; Schweitzer
& Garcia, 2010; Thonhauser, 2022). To examine how
these interactions lead to an overall increase in groups’
emotions, it is helpful to conceptualize emotions at
another level: the collective level. Collective emotions
are the emotions of a collective when they are evalu-
ated at the level of multiple people at the same time
rather than the individual as a unit of analysis
Perspectives on Psychological Science XX(X) 3

Fig. 1. The infrastructure-perception-intersection framework that is meant to capture the

processes that contribute to an increase in the duration and intensity of collective emo-
tions. “Interaction” refers to any situation in which the emotions of one person impact
or are being impacted by those of others; “cognition” is meant to include a broad variety
of processes in which people perceive, evaluate, or even simulate what others feel; and
“infrastructure” refers to the structural, physical, or virtual space in which emotion interac-
tions and cognitions may occur.

(Goldenberg, Garcia, et al., 2020; Huebner, 2011; Páez
& Rimé, 2014; Sullivan, 2014; von Scheve & Ismer, 2013).
A good analogy for the idea of collective emotion is of
a forest fire. When examining a forest fire one can look
at the fire within a single tree and examine how it accu-
mulates the trees over time. But a forest fire can also be
evaluated at the forest level: how it is impacted by the
forest density and terrain, how it spreads as a function
of the wind, and whether its overall intensity is increas-
ing or decreasing. In some cases, thinking of the indi-
vidual tree is important, but it may limit our ability to
predict the overall strength of the fire. Just like the size
of the fire is determined by the amount of trees that is
currently burning, the strength of collective emotions is
often measured by the amount of people expressing
emotions at a given time and the average intensity of
these emotions (Goldenberg, Garcia, et al., 2020). Think-
ing about collective emotion is especially important
when emotions at the individual and collective level
show different patterns of behavior over time, and look-
ing merely at one level creates a misleading impression
(see, e.g., Goldenberg, Garcia, et al., 2020). Collective
emotion is the outcome variable of the question of what
makes groups emotional, and therefore from now on I
use the term “collective emotion” to describe group
emotionality.
What Makes Groups Emotional:
Infrastructure, Perception, and Interaction
A common insight in complex systems is that collective
behavior is the result of a dynamic correspondence
between interactions and infrastructure. Because social
behaviors spread differently depending on the network
in which they occur, the idea that infrastructure and
interactions are interdependent is straightforward and
is well explored in complex systems. If we want to
understand how ant colonies respond to changes in
food resources, we must consider the way colonies are
organized, how ants exchange information via interac-
tions, and the influence of such interactions on infra-
structure (e.g., Ouellette & Gordon, 2021). A similar
approach can be taken when thinking about brain pro-
cesses by focusing on brain architecture and commu-
nication between neurons and its effect on such
architecture (Alexander-Bloch et al., 2013).
Things are more complicated, however, when it
comes to human interactions because unlike ants or
neurons, people’s dynamics are also impacted by how
people perceive, represent and understand these dynam-
ics (Galesic et al., 2021; Vlasceanu et al., 2018). People’s
perception of the collective emotion is often inaccurate
(Brady et al., 2023; Lau et al., 2016), which may impact
both how people react themselves to emotional situa-
tions and the social ties that they may choose to interact
with. Therefore, understanding human collective behav-
ior requires adding an important component in the
model: people’s cognition of the collective system.
To think of the unfolding of collective emotions, one
must consider a process in which infrastructure, social
perception, and social interactions interact (Fig. 1).
Although conceptually each component in this frame-
work can be discussed in separate, the reality is that
they are never truly separated, and each component
4 Goldenberg

a b
Without Emotion Interactions With Emotion Interactions
1.00 1.00

0.75 0.75
Intensity

Intensity
0.50 0.50

0.25 0.25

0.00 0.00
0 25 50 75 100 0 25 50 75 100
Time Course Time Course
Fig. 2. Simulation of the idea of activation with or without emotional interaction. The graphs represent people’s emotional intensity over
time, either without emotion interactions (a) or with emotion interactions (b). Interactions lead people to be activated (depicted by sharp
increases in intensity from 0) or reactivated by the emotions of their peers.

dynamically influences all others. Therefore, to under-
stand how the components of the interaction-cognition-
infrastructure framework leads to increased collective
emotion, we need to focus on the relationship between
these components. In line with this idea, the structure
of each of these subsections is the same. First I describe
the essence of each of the components and how such
components may contribute to amplification. Then I
explain how each component impacts the other two.
My hope is to provide an overview of the dynamic
processes between each of the components to all
others.
Interaction
The term “emotion interaction” is meant to capture situ-
ations in which the emotions of one person impact or
are impacted by those of others. Before thinking of con-
tagion or influence—which are the obvious candidates
for interactions—group emotionality can be driven by
the fact that people tend to express stronger emotions
when others are watching (Barrett, 2012; Darwin, 1872;
Ekman & Friesen, 1969; Hess & Fischer, 2014; Lazerus
et al., 2016; Manstead & Fischer, 2001; Van Kleef, 2009).
These expressions may or may not be associated with
increased experience ( Jakobs et al., 2001; Williams et al.,
2021). Amplification in expression is especially likely if
it serves some individual or collective goals (for a review,
see Porat et al., 2020), and in many group contexts,
expressing emotions in the presence of others is congru-
ent with both of these goals. For example, expressing
outrage serves reputational goals in that the individual
signals their true group membership to others and is
likely to be rewarded (Brady et al., 2020; Jordan & Rand,
2020). But people are also more likely to express out-
rage in group contexts because they believe that
expressing these emotions would help the group
achieve its goals in relation to the conflict (Cohen-Chen
et al., 2020; Goldenberg et al., 2014; Porat, Halperin, &
Tamir, 2016). In such cases, the mere communication
of emotions is most likely to lead to an amplification
in collective emotion.
An increase in collective emotions can also be
caused by the fact that emotions spread from one per-
son to another via social interactions, a process that is
often called emotion contagion (Barsade, 2002; Fischer
et al., 2003; Goldenberg & Gross, 2020; Hatfield et al.,
1994; Páez et al., 2015; Parkinson, 2011; Peters &
Kashima, 2015; Rimé, 2007a). There are a few ways in
which emotion contagion can contribute to changes in
collective emotion. The first and most important is the
notion of emotional activation (sometimes referred to
as emotional cascades). Activation occurs when some-
one who has not been emotional—either because they
were not aware of the situation or because they calmed
down from a previous emotional activation—becomes
emotional (again) when exposed to an emotional per-
son or people (Alvarez et al., 2015; Brady et al., 2017;
Goldenberg, Garcia, et al., 2020; Jonas et al., 2021). As
suggested in Figure 2, activation merely leads to more
people becoming emotional and to an increase in col-
lective emotion.
Activation is not the only factor that contributes to
the perpetuation of collective emotion. In some cases,
Perspectives on Psychological Science XX(X)
a b
Symmetric Contagion
1.00 SSymmetric
Sy mm
met
etriricc Co
Cont
Contagion
ntag
nta io
ag ionn
0.75
Intensity
0.50
0.25
0.00
2 4 6 8
Time Course
Fig. 3. Simulation of a symmetric and asymmetric contagion as affecting emotions over time. In symmetric contagion (a), emotions of
multiple people tend to consolidate, but not necessarily to increase in intensity. In asymmetric contagion (b), people with higher intensity
are more influential compared with people with lower intensity, which contributes to an increase in collective emotion.
people who are already emotional may modify the
intensity of their emotional response as a function of
what others around them feel (emotional influence).
When it comes to emotional influence, however, for it
to lead to an increase in collective emotion there needs
to be some factor that may lead people to be more
influenced by stronger compared with weaker emotions
(Fig. 3a; Bosse et al., 2014), which may not always be
the case (see, e.g., L. C. Lin et al., 2018). As suggested,
because group-related processes often lead people to
be motivated to express stronger emotions in the pres-
ence of others, we can assume an asymmetric process
in emotional influence in which people who are moti-
vated to express emotions are also more affected by
stronger emotional expressions in their group, as dem-
onstrated previously (Goldenberg et al., 2019).
Emotional interactions may not only lead to change
in collective emotion as an independent process but
also impact the social infrastructure in which they occur
in ways that further perpetuates amplification. Emo-
tional content tends to be shared more and therefore
spreads further in networks. This means that emotions
lead to further engagement between people (Rimé,
2007b; Rimé et al., 1998; Stieglitz & Dang-Xuan, 2013).
Given that prior engagement, especially a rewarding
one, is a strong predictor of future engagement (Brady
et al., 2020; Lindström et al., 2021), emotions seem to
be contributing to the strengthening of social interac-
tions, which then leads to an even further stronger
activation in future interactions. In other words,
repeated stimuli contribute to the fact that networks
become more emotionally reactive over time.
5
Asymmetric Contagion
0.8
0.7
Intensity
0.6
0.5
0.4
0.3
10 2 4 6 8 10
Time Course
Furthermore, people seem to be attracted by others
who express strong and extreme emotion and tend to
prefer them as social ties, even without previous inter-
action (Goldenberg et al., 2023). Therefore, when a
network becomes emotional, the network infrastructure
tends to cluster around emotional people (Romero
et al., 2019), and connections to emotional members
become stronger, which contributes to further perpetu-
ation of emotions in preceding interactions.
Emotional interactions also impact people’s cogni-
tion in important ways that contribute to amplifica-
tion. As initially suggested by Durkheim and Le Bon
(Durkheim, 1912; Le Bon, 1896), when people experi-
ence emotions with others, their experience is associ-
ated with the understanding that “we are feeling
emotions together” (Thonhauser, 2022), which contrib-
utes to amplification in their emotions. An empirical
study by Páez and colleagues further examined the
specific components of such feelings and suggested
that social gatherings give rise to perceived synchrony,
increased salience of one’s identity and integration in
the group, and a sense of empowerment, all of which
are associated with an increase in emotional experience
(Páez et al., 2015). Emotional interactions therefore
impact both infrastructure and cognition.
Cognition
The term “cognition” is meant to include a broad variety
of processes in which people perceive, evaluate, or
even simulate what others feel. The tendency to con-
stantly track and evaluate the attitudes, emotions, and
6 Goldenberg

Fig. 4. Example of a crowd-evaluation task in which participants see a crowd express-

ing different degrees of emotion and are asked to evaluate the mean collective emotion
(Goldenberg et al., 2021). Results suggest that people tend to overestimate a crowd’s emo-
tions and that this is driven by spending more time attending to more emotional faces.

behaviors of one’s social environment is an inherent
tendency of humans (Krafft et al., 2021; Smith & Mackie,
2016b). Therefore, when evaluating the processes that
contribute to increases in collective emotions, is it cru-
cial to consider not only how emotional interactions
lead to emotionality but also the ways in which people’s
representation of what others feel may play a role in
changes in collective emotion.
Recent research suggests that when exposed to the
emotions of others, people tend to perceive these emo-
tions as stronger than they actually are and to further
evaluate collective emotions as more emotional (Brady
et al., 2023). This recent work points to amplification
as a result of the evaluation of a single emotional
expression, but amplification may be even more
extreme given people often see multiple emotional
expressions in response to any situation. When people
evaluate multiple emotions they tend to automatically
generate summary statistics, particularly averages, that
help them to summarize these emotions and make
sense of the world quickly and relatively efficiently
(Elias et al., 2017; Haberman & Whitney, 2007, 2010;
Whitney et al., 2014; Wolfe et al., 2015). Research on
the aggregation of multiple emotions seems to suggest
that perceivers are biased toward assuming that groups
are more emotional than they actually are (Goldenberg
et al., 2021; Goldenberg, Sweeny, et al., 2020; Fig. 4).
This amplification in the evaluation of collective emo-
tion seems to occur because of the fact that perceivers
tend to spend more time attending to more emotional
(compared with more neutral) expressions (Goldenberg
et al., 2021). Amplification in evaluating collective
emotions seems to be happening when people are
exposed to emotions not only concurrently but also
sequentially (Goldenberg et al., 2022). This is driven
mainly by the tendency to remember stronger emo-
tional expressions when integrating sequential
information.
People’s evaluation of the collective emotion could
affect their own emotions. If we assume that people
are influenced by what they believe to be the collective
emotion, and that the perceived collective emotion is
higher than the actual collective emotion, then cogni-
tion contributes to an upward spiral of influence. Take,
for example, a person whose initial emotional intensity
is x. We assume that evaluating the collective emotion
as x + 5 would lead to a greater change in the individual
emotion compared with evaluating the collective emo-
tion as x + 1, which then further perpetuates the
increase in collective emotion. Although this idea has
not yet been examined empirically, a recent agent-
based model tried to simulate the amplification caused
merely by an amplification in perception, pointing to
an increase in collective emotion (Haeringen et al.,
2021). Further empirical work is needed to examine the
potential consequences of such a process.
Amplification in the evaluation of collective emotion
also leads to the formation of social ties that express
stronger emotions. Research on the perception of aver-
age collective emotions suggest that people tend to
overestimate the intensity of fellow group members’
positive and negative emotions in response to political
issues (Brady et al., 2022; Goldenberg, Abruzzo, et al.,
2022; Lau et al., 2016). Furthermore, in a recent study,
Perspectives on Psychological Science XX(X)
No Preference for High Intensity Emotions
Low High
Outrage Outrage
3 1 2 4
Low High
Outrage Outrage
Fig. 5. Depiction of the results from Goldenberg et al. (2022). A case in which there is no preference toward high-
intensity emotions (a) is shown alongside a case in which there is some preference toward high-intensity emotions (b).
When participants were given the option to pick peers out of a potential sample, they showed a preference toward
peers who expressed higher intensity emotions. Participants are represented by the red dots, and all potential social
ties are represented by the blue dots.
Goldenberg et al. (2023) found that the tendency to
overestimate the collective emotional response was
associated with selecting ties who express more extreme
emotions. If people tend to select more emotional ties,
they will also end up being influenced by these emo-
tions and become emotional themselves. Therefore, this
mere bias in perception is likely to contribute to a
change in the network infrastructure and thus an
increase in collective emotion.
Infrastructure
All social interactions, and particularly emotional inter-
actions, occur within a certain social infrastructure. This
infrastructure may be dependent on physical space,
such as the shape of a building; virtual space, such as
one’s social network; as well as psychological space,
such as people’s perceptions of who they can reach out
to. When thinking of increases in collective emotions
as a function of social interactions, it is commonly
assumed that the infrastructure under which such inter-
actions occur is fixed. But infrastructure, interactions,
and cognition are involved in a dynamic process of
influence that further contributes to increases in col-
lective emotion compared with the emotions of sepa-
rated individuals.
Social infrastructure is affected by two types of deci-
sions regarding one’s network. The first is the decision
to join or not to join a certain group, which is often
accompanied with the psychological categorization of
being a group member (Turner, 1985; Turner et al.,
1987; Turner & Reynolds, 2001). The second is the deci-
sion of the specific ties one wishes to connect within
7
Preference for High Intensity Emotions
Low High
Outrage Outrage
3 1 2 4
Low High
Outrage Outrage
a specific group. Looking first at group choice and
categorization, it seems clear that there are many situ-
ations in certain levels of group emotionality that are
likely to lead more members to join. In both a positive
and negative context, groups who express a lot of emo-
tions are likely to attract more attention than groups
who express less emotion (for work on collective
action, e.g., see van Zomeren et al., 2012). People may
prefer a certain group not only on the basis of the
degree of emotionality it expresses but also the coher-
ence of its emotions, with initial evidence pointing to
preference toward low variance in emotion expression
(Goldenberg, Sweeny, et al., 2020). Choosing to be a
member of coherent groups in terms of their emotional-
ity is likely to lead an individual to be more influenced
by this group’s emotions, which should therefore lead
to an increased emotionality within specific individuals
over time.
But even after people have chosen to enter a specific
group, people’s choice of social ties within the group
may be as important as choosing to join the group in
the first place. This question was recently investigated
in a study in which participants were asked to provide
emotional responses—both in ratings and in texts—to
political situations (Goldenberg et al., 2023). Partici-
pants then saw peers’ responses to the same situations
and were asked to choose which peers they would like
to see in future trials. Participants preferred peers who
represented a more extreme emotional response of
their political view compared with a moderate emo-
tional response (Fig. 5).
Network infrastructure impacts emotional interac-
tions. At the most basic level, people prefer to share
8 Goldenberg
emotions with closer others (Bourgeois & Hess, 2008;
Depow et al., 2021; Jakobs et al., 2001; Lawler & Yoon,
1998; H. Lin et al., 2014; Romero et al., 2019), which
should suggest that increasing the strength of ties
within groups should increase the frequency and inten-
sity of emotional expressions. Likewise, some empirical
evidence suggests that emotions spread further in clus-
tered networks, in which people share many similar
connections (Alvarez et al., 2015; Lawler & Yoon, 1998)
or are present in the same physical space (Páez et al.,
2015; Rennung & Göritz, 2016), with proximity predict-
ing increased synchrony in emotional expressions
(Konvalinka et al., 2011). However, research in this
space is just in its first steps, and more work is needed
to understand the connection between network infra-
structure and emotional interactions.
Aside from providing the infrastructure in which
emotions become stronger or weaker, network structure
interacts with collective emotions in other interesting
ways. In some cases, the spread of emotions within
specific infrastructure may modify the nature of the
emotion. For example, Doré et al. (2015) examined the
spread of emotions in response to the Sandy Hook
Elementary School shooting in Newton, Connecticut.
Their analysis of tweets showed that increasing tempo-
ral and spatial distance predicted a shift in emotional
tone away from sadness and toward anxiety. In other
cases, it is the type of emotion that interacts in interest-
ing ways with network structures. For example, research
on the association between network structure and the
spread of emotions suggest that negative emotions are
more likely to spread within weaker ties compared with
positive emotions (Fan et al., 2016; Schöne et al., 2023).
These are just initial attempts to examine the interaction
between infrastructure and emotional interactions.
In addition to influencing emotional interactions,
network infrastructure may influence emotion cogni-
tion in ways that may contribute to increases in col-
lective emotion. Generally speaking, people seem to
represent knowledge about the collective by bringing
to memory more frequent interactions (for review, see
Galesic et al., 2018). If indeed people tend to seek
others who express emotions, representations of the
collective emotion would be higher than it actually is.
Therefore, when evaluating the collective emotional
response, people may amplify their estimation of the
collective, which as discussed above should lead to
amplification.
Discussion and Future Direction
The goal of this article was to explore processes that may
contribute to group emotionality. I suggest extending the
way we understand group emotionality beyond the
notion of emotional interactions and propose an interaction-
cognition-infrastructure framework to examine the pro-
cesses that underlie groups’ emotionality. Having this
broader view can allow us to both improve our ability to
predict emotional situations and to change them when
they are unhelpful on unwanted.
Predicting collective emotions
Efforts to predict collective emotion can be divided to
data-driven attempts, in which algorithms are applied
to predict collective emotions, and modeling attempts,
in which models are built to explain and reveal the
ways in which collective emotions unfold. Data-driven
approaches to predictions have so far been very limited.
One of the reasons is that building the data set that is
required for such a predictive model is very challenging
and requires having multiple groups responding to mul-
tiple situations. However, inspiration for such work can
be taken from research on predicting the spread of
online cascades (Cheng et al., 2014; Goel et al., 2012;
Kupavskii et al., 2012). Given our ability to capture
emotions, and given the tools we have to predict emo-
tions, this seems like a natural next step in research on
group emotionality.
The most obvious way to predict emotionality is by
looking at collective emotions as they are expressed
on social media. Good predictive models of collective
emotion should be focused on evaluating the three
components suggested in the framework proposed
herein. First, researchers interested in predicting the
progression of collective emotions should try to evalu-
ate both the degree of spreadability of emotions in a
certain situation, which could be measured by the num-
ber of average shares a content receives. Second, pre-
diction models can also examine network infrastructure
such as clustering and the centrality of activated nodes
to try to predict contagion. An estimation of cognition,
however, is hard to achieve without self-report; how-
ever, amplification in the evaluations of collective emo-
tions may be assumed on the basis of the clustering of
emotional interactions. If people are exposed to mul-
tiple emotional expressions, we should assume that
their evaluation of the collective emotions is amplified
when adding these perceptions into a bottom-up model.
Although data-driven attempts to predict collective
emotions have been relatedly sparse, there are many
computational models that attempt to capture collective
emotions (Bosse et al., 2014; Fan et al., 2018; Gao &
Liu, 2017; Garcia et al., 2011; Haeringen et al., 2021;
Hill et al., 2010; Riahi, 2015; Wang et al., 2015; Xiang
et al., 2018; Xu et al., 2021). These models were built
with the hope that they could provide preliminary sig-
nals for changes in collective emotion. Most models,
Perspectives on Psychological Science XX(X)
however, try to explain collective emotion merely as a
result of emotion contagion. A first attempt to expand
the processes that may contribute to an increase in
collective emotion is Bosse and colleagues’ ASCRIBE
model (Bosse et al., 2014; see also Neto et al., 2015)
that captures the insight—that is very much similar to
the one captured above—that for groups to become
more emotional, simple symmetrical contagion cannot
be enough (Bosse et al., 2014; see also Neto et al.,
2015). Bosse and colleagues added asymmetry in con-
tagion to their model; however, they did not provide an
explanation of the source of such bias. Building on
Bosse and colleagues’ ASCRIBE model, Haeringen et al.
(2021) not only assumed asymmetry in contagion but
also implemented amplification in collective emotion
driven by perceiving collective emotion. Haeringen
et al.’s model is the first to specifically address amplifi-
cation driven by cognition in a way that is similar to
what was specified in this article. It therefore introduces
an important shift in the way collective emotions are
modeled, which is very much congruent with the view
of the current article. I suggest that future models should
implement a broader view of processes that contribute
to emotionality using the suggested framework pro-
posed herein, in line with this positive development.
Improvements in agent-based models should also
inform data-driven approaches by pointing to the fea-
tures that should be captured to predict collective emo-
tion. This approach of providing structural limitations
on bottom-up machine learning has been found useful
in predicting complex phenomena such as climate (see,
e.g., Yuval & O’Gorman, 2020).
Regulating collective emotions
Collective emotions are a natural part of group behavior,
and in many cases their unfolding plays a role in healthy
social behavior. Take, for example, positive emotions as
a result of a collective celebration (Konvalinka et al.,
2011; Páez et al., 2015) or negative emotions such as
sadness and anger over the loss of a person of some
collective tragedy (Garcia & Rimé, 2019; Porat, Halperin,
Mannheim, & Tamir, 2016). However, in some cases,
groups’ emotions may lead to unproductive or even
destructive behaviors. Take, for example, situations of
extreme violence or aggression that are driven from
anger or hatred (Bar-Tal et al., 2007; Halperin, 2008), or
cases of extreme distress and anxiety that could lead to
irrational and potentially dangerous behavior (Bartolucci
et al., 2021; Başak et al., 2018). In these cases, finding
ways to change the collective emotion could have a
tremendous benefit to people lives and well-being.
Research on emotion regulation has thus far almost
exclusively focused on the regulation of individuals,
paying attention to either self-regulation (Gross, 2015)
9
or the regulation of single others (Niven et al., 2011;
Zaki & Williams, 2013). Recently, however, there has
been a few initial attempts to conceptualize the regula-
tion of collective emotion (Goldenberg, 2023). I define
collective emotion regulation as a process in which a
subset of the group engages in behavior that has the
intentional goal of affecting the collective emotional
response. The most important component of this defini-
tion is the fact that regulation is driven by a goal to
affect the collective emotion (Gross, 2015). This does
not mean that individuals have to be aware of their goal.
The notion of a goal is merely a definitional tool designed
to differentiate between emotion generation and regula-
tion. Collective emotion can be activated either in a
top-down process by a leader of a group who wishes to
affect the collective emotional response or emerge as a
bottom-up process when an aggregated force of multiple
people shares the same goal and is able to execute it by
interacting with each other and other group members
(see below example). The fact that the target of regula-
tion is more than one person makes collective emotion
regulation unique in various ways, as all of the processes
that were described as impacting the intensity of collec-
tive emotions can also help in its regulation. Therefore,
when regulating a collective emotion, one needs to con-
sider both the degree to which such regulation efforts
could spread, how they are perceived, and how they are
affected by the network infrastructure in which they are
implemented.
The current framework, originally designed to exam-
ine group emotionality, can also be applied to the
notion of emotion regulation. Starting with interactions,
just like emotions can spread as a results of emotion
contagion so as regulation. One example of a bottom-
up process of emotion regulation is regulation that may
occur in investment forums. In an attempt to regulate
a community of investors after a report of bad quarterly
results, group members may try to offer interpretations
that may reduce the collective anxiety and the sale of
the stock. These interpretations may converge and con-
tribute in the creation of a narrative—which can be
evaluated as a form of modification in cognition—that
would improve the collective’s ability to deal with the
results (Schwartzstein & Sunderam, 2021). The spread
of regulation and its ability to affect collective emotions
obviously are highly dependent on the infrastructure
of the network because clustered networks are more
likely to support regulation, which is more likely to
spread within complex conation. This is just one exam-
ple of how the framework outlined in this article can
be used to examine not only emotion generation but
also regulation. There are more open questions than
answers in the domain of collective emotion regulation,
and I am looking forward to exciting advances in this
new domain of research.
10
Concluding comments
The current era brings many challenges to human flour-
ishing—from intragroup and intergroup conflicts to
environmental challenges that seem to threaten our
existence in this world. These challenges lead to strong
emotional reactions both at the individual and collec-
tive level, which may further perpetuate these destruc-
tive cycles and lead to more violence, distress, and
despair. It is therefore crucial for us to be thinking
about the processes that contribute to these increases
in emotions so that we can find way to predict the
intensity and duration of these emotions and find ways
to change them.
Transparency
Action Editor: Henrik Olsson
Editor: Interim Editorial Panel
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared that there were no conflicts of
interest with respect to the authorship or the publication
of this article.
ORCID iD
Amit Goldenberg https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9417-5682
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